Rolls-Royce is working on a robotic cockroach that can fix plane engines

By Bryan ClarkRolls-Royce, a company perhaps best known for airplane engines and fine automobiles, is now creating tiny cockroaches that can crawl inside tight spaces to spot potential problems and perform routine maintenance. These roaches aren’t of the household variety, however; they’re robots. Rolls-Royce‘s robotic roaches (try saying that five times fast) would stand about 15 millimeters tall (about half an inch) and weigh in at just a few ounces. Each would be equipped with a camera as well as optics for 3D scanning that would allow engineers to remotely assess problems before retooling the robo roaches to perform the desired fix.…